Remove the ball on this gooseneck hitch and store it in a secure location to get full use of your truck bed when you're not towing. Installs to existing, factory attachment points on your vehicle - no rail kit required.

How to Install the Draw-Tite Hide-A-Goose Underbed Gooseneck Hitch on a 2017 Ram 3500

Speaker 1: Today on our 2017 Ram 3500, we're going to take a look at and show you how to install the Hide-A-Goose underbed gooseneck trailer hitch. Offering a 30,000 pound capacity, the part number is 9466. Now here's what our gooseneck's going to look like installed on the vehicle when ready for use. As you can see, you're going to have the two and 5/16 inch ball here and safety chain connection points. They're on a spring loaded, so that's going to keep them from rattling, keep them from bouncing around but still gives you plenty of room to get even the biggest chains connected. By raising the handle and rotating it, you're going to be able to lift that ball right out of there.

You can see that handle on top actually pushes these balls out where they ride in the socket.Now the nice thing about the ball set up is if we don't have it in the right position, we can turn that to the locked position, and then just rotate the ball until that pops down in. That gives us good position. You see there's not a lot of movement or play with the ball. Now this is a chrome plated ball, so it should stand up to years of use and stay looking pretty nice. Now the hitch itself is going to offer a capacity of 30,000 pounds in gross trailer weight.

It's going to be the total weight of your trailer and anything that you might have loaded up on it. It offers a 7,500 pound vertical load limit, so that's the maximum downward force that we can put here on our ball. But of course you do want to consult the owners manual of the Ram to see what it's rated for and don't go over that.Now when not in use, Draw-Tite's provided a cap. You can see that's going to fit down and in the top part of that gooseneck, just to keep out any dirt, debris or moisture. You can see with the bed liner like what we've got here, it kind of interferes with that.

So to use it with a drop in liner, you'll have to enlarge this outer hole slightly. For a standard spray in bed liners or regular bed, that would fit right in.Now here's what the underbed installation kit looks like. From inside the bed we see nothing. This is where all of the heavy duty material is. Now this is going to be heavy duty steel.

You can see how nice and thick it is. Got really, really good welds and they wrapped all that up with a black powder coat finish. As far as installation goes, you really only need one size tool, it's 24 millimeter for the main bolt. And also for our safety chain nuts that go on here at our safety chain connection points. A kit like this allows us to bolt directly into the factory mounting locations for the gooseneck, so we don't have to add the big cross bars and we don't have to add the side plates, which are very common when doing gooseneck hitches.Now underneath the truck, there's a few things we're going to do like lowering the spare tire. We're going to remove the heat shield here and we're also going to lower the exhaust down a little bit. That's going to give us good room to get up and fasten our hardware in place. There are five bolts that hold the heat shield. You can see the three here. These you want to use a 10 millimeter socket for. The two others are going to be on the back side of this lip. We've got one here, pretty much right in the middle of the truck and one a little bit closer to the passenger side right in there. Now just behind the heat shield, that was right here, you've got one exhaust hanger to remove. It's a good idea to use some spray lubricant here just to help everything slide apart a little bit easier.Then to remove them, we use a big pry bar or a large screwdriver. Just need to push out from the back. Now if we follow that exhaust pipe forward, we're going to have two more located pretty much right here where the drive shaft meets the rear end. We'll get those removed as well. Now you'll also want to come to the next two in front of those. These are going to be more in the middle of the truck and we're going to get those removed as well. Now we're going to use a three and a half inch hole saw. This is right here in the middle of the truck bed directly above the axle. And we want to use this to mark the center of our hole. Now with that spot marked, you can either continue to drill through and use your quarter inch bit as a guide. We're just going to switch to a longer bit. This particular truck has the plastic bed liner, so this is going to allow us to go through both the bed and the liner.Now using the hole that's come through our bed as a guide, we're going to drill our three and a half inch hole down. Now we'll just check that edge and if we have any sharp spots or anything like that we can get it cleaned up. You can use a file or just going to use like a carbine bit here. Now we're going to use some clear enamel just to go over top of that. It's going to cover up any of that bare metal surface and help to make sure we don't have any rust issues. Now with our hole drilled out, we can get our nut plates put in. These are going to go in through the wheel well where we've got an access panel. The panel's right here. They're two fasteners, these just are kind of like a push pin fastener but you'll use a Phillips screwdriver and kind of unthread the center. Then you can pull it out. Just like that, it'll free up that side, do the same thing over here. Then we lift up and pull out. That'll give us access to slide it in right above our gooseneck prep.Then we'll just slide these in. Right over top and once we get underneath before we lift that head in place, we'll get them in position. Now let's go to the driver's side and we'll repeat that same process there. Now we're just going to adjust that nut plate. You can see it right up in our attachment point here. One of the nuts you want sitting over this hole. The other one you want sitting over this hole, just like that. We'll get that done on both sides, we'll be ready to lift our head into position.Now we can grab our head. We want the of course the center section here to go through the hole that's been created. And it's really not a bad idea to get yourself an extra set of hands to kind of help you hold it in position while you get your hardware started. We're going to be using the bolts provided with the kit. Want a flat washer and a lock washer on each one and then that needs to thread into our nut plate. Alright, once we have two really well started, we can just let it rest there. We can get our other two in place. Now we're going to use a 24 millimeter socket, we're going to snug down all four of our bolts and we'll torque them to the specifications listed in the instructions.Now I'm going to use a 5/8 diameter drill bit. I'm going to use it to mark the center of each of my holes. You can see we've got one, two, three, and four here. You want to drill these up through so then we can bring our 5/8 bit down from the top. Now I'm just going to trim up around the bed liner here. If you have a spray in bed liner or if it's just a regular truck bed, you probably won't have to do this. Although if you do have any sharp edges or anything like hanging in the middle, you want to clean those up. Use a lik bit more clear coat there, just to make sure don't have any corrosion. We'll pass out U bolts down through. Want to make sure they move freely. You can see this one's kind of binding a little bit. What we'll do is open this hole up just a touch. Now once both of them are moving nice and freely, we'll head underneath and attach the hardware there.Now on each U bolt leg, we want to slide on our flat washer, going to place on the spring. And you want to compress that so you can get your nut started. We'll do that for all four locations. Now while we hold the spring up and out of the way, we want to tighten down our lock nuts, so we have three threads showing below them. Now we're ready to get our exhaust put back in place. Also, put our heat shield and spare tire back in, if you decided to remove that. You want to use a little bit more spray lubricant on these and then once the holes are lined up, they should slide on fairly easily.Now with your wires here that we're attached to the nut plates, you can cut these off, so they're back underneath the frame a little bit. What I like to do is just take a pair of pliers and kind of flex it and you're going to weaken that up enough it'll just break off of that plate. Just like that and we'll put that side panel back in. Now with these as they go back in, you'll just put the outside in and you can just push the middle. You don't have to use your screwdriver at this point. Now we'll go do the same thing for our passenger side. Now we're going to get our heat shield put back in place as well. Remember you've got five bolts, three are going to be over here on the frame rail. Then we've got two on our cross member here. One towards the middle, one towards the passenger side.Now you won't need to enlarge this hole very much to get that cap on if you do happen to have them bed liner like what we've got. I'm also going to take a square notch out one side. I'm going to use the back just so you can get your finger in there, lift up on that cap. Now you can see our cap fits down in there properly and we've got room to where we can pull it up from the rear there. With everything back in place, that's going to complete our installation of the Hide-A-Goose underbed gooseneck trailer hitch, part number 9466 on our 2017 Ram 3500.

Yes, I would like an email notification if someone replies to my comment?

Info for this part was:

Test Fit:

Joe V

Video Edited:

Joshua S

Video Edited:

Jacob T

Video Edited:

Kathleen M

Video by:

Alan C

Test Fit:

Randy B

Video by:

Zach D

At etrailer.com we provide the best information available about the products we sell. We take the quality of our information seriously so that you can get the right part the first time. Let us know if anything is missing or if you have any questions.